Until recently both scholarly and popular discussions of the catastrophic famine in the Soviet Union in 1931-1933 invariably have described it as an artificial or ''manmade" famine. Certain well-known scholars have dominated this discussion, expressing two main interpretations of the famine. A Ukrainian nationalist interpretation holds that the Soviet regime, and specifically losif Stalin, intentionally imposed the famine to suppress the nationalist aspirations of Ukraine and Ukrainians; revisionists argue that the leadership imposed the famine to suppress more widespread peasant resistance to collectivization. According to these views, a natural disaster that could have caused a famine did not take place in those years.

While the intentionalist interpretations of the famine remain widely held, recent research has cast substantial doubt on them. Several studies and document collections have shown conclusively that the famine did not stop at Ukraine's borders,but affected rural and urban areas throughout the Soviet Union,and even the military. Studies based on this evidence, and on a reevaluation of published Soviet statistics, have shown that the grain harvests of 1931 and 1932 must have been much smaller than officially acknowledged.

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